Variables suddenly stopped working

[james_hathaway]

I have just opened an old App and started making a few edits.

After a few hours, the App suddenly started highlighting a load of Red errors in my formulas - always surrounding the global variables that I use.

All of a sudden, without any changes, the App throws an error:

"Incompatible Type. We can't evaluate your formula because the context variable types are incompatible with the types of values in other places in your app."

This error is obviously ludicrous, as i am CERTAIN that the variable in question is ALWAYS treated as a Number.

While investigating this issue, I noticed something curious about one of the errors - it was on an IsBlank formula.

So the code looks like this:

Set(variable,1);

IsBlank(variable);

the "IsBlank" formula returns the error: "Invalid Argument Type".

This, of course, should NEVER happen.

So, I thought that this PowerApp is obviously corrupted, and I needed to roll back to a previous version.

Guess what - when I reverted to the version from BEFORE any of my changes (a LIVE app that has been working fine for a year or more) - all of a sudden, all my variable formulas are returning errors. again, this is on an App that worked before, and HAS NOT BEEN CHANGED.

This is a lot like the change they made in 2017 from weak typed formulas to strong typed formulas that completely broke all PowerApps back then.

Has Microsoft done another PowerApps update that changes all the rules without telling anyone?

[skelecopter]

Hi, I am having the same issue. Did you ever resolve this?

[Anonymous]

Hi James,

Did you manage to solve this issue?

Best regards,

Emad

[skelecopter]

I was able to get around this issue by wrapping my problematic Set formulas with an IfError expression. It isn't an elegant solution, but it works.

Microsoft will be releasing a different kind of way to set variables this year that can only be declared once and will update more dynamically (immutable variables), so hopefully that will be a way to avoid this issue.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2022wave1/power-apps/power-fx-named-for...

[glenquarless]

I just bypassed this problem by adding a set for the variable to the app.onstart, that seems to have resolved it